Here at Kotaku we get constant shit for posting articles about Sony screwing up. But honestly, these things write themselves. It's gotten to the point now where it's not even funny anymore, it's just sad and confusing.

With that doleful preface firmly in place, I present to you, my darling readers, the newest Blu-Ray booboo: the disks are apparently "hard to make." They also have an additional layer of copy protection, which just makes things needlessly complicated. Gamasutra has an article addressing the most recent podcast from Microsoft's Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry 'Major Nelson' Hryb, interviewing Amir Majidimehr, whose group at Microsoft oversees audio/video compression technologies, as well as high-definition optical formats.

According to [Majidimehr], Blu-ray moves the recording surface very close to the top layer of the disc, protected by just a very thin coating, and that this makes maintaining "high reliability" of discs during the actual manufacturing process much more difficult.

This factor, according to Majidimehr, is the key difference between the two formats, as HD-DVD, like traditional DVD, protects its data between two layers of protective plastic - above and below - thus making manufacturing of the discs much more reliable.

And that extra layer of copy protection I mentioned, it's called BD+. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray both already have the AACS copy protection (developed jointly by Sony and MS), so the BD+ is redundant.

Thanks for the tip, Jason. Bad news and more bad news. Can I please just have a PS3? No? Fine... Eliza gauger

Read more here [Gamasutra, via FlickerGaming]